Why Recycling Is Mostly Garbage
While these atrocities became synonymous with a civilizational breach, they grew out of Europe’s racist, brutal history of colonial rule. As Nazi imperial planners prepared for the conquest and depopulation of the east, and calculated allocations of food and other resources, they studied other colonial powers. Just as Europe’s colonial empires plundered gold, timber, cotton, spices, and fossil fuels, “the imperial visions of the Third Reich, too, were focused on natural resources,” Berg writes, “such as iron, oil, and fertile soil, and the Nazis robbed whatever luxury goods they could get their hands on.” In the end, the contingencies and pressures of war led the Nazi empire to extract gold from people, rather than land, and resources from slave laborers instead of nature. Concentration camp prisoners, POWs, and deportees from enemy nations unloaded trains crammed with junk, scrapped metal, and squeezed value from every available textile. Ordinary Germans, meanwhile, proved eager to display their commitment to the future and became dedicated recyclers. In Berg’s telling, the Volksgemeinschaft was also a Müllgemeinschaft (garbage community), and even down to the regime’s final weeks with Allied troops closing in, Germans clung to the fantasy that old textiles and piles of rubble could be recycled into weapons of war, leading them to final victory.
In Berg’s story, this chapter in the history of recycling is about war and imperial exploitation. Perhaps even more confounding is that today, books about Nazi Germany fill libraries, and yet historians have somehow failed, until now, to grasp the ideological and strategic importance of recycling. As Berg makes clear, waste is everywhere in the archives—the Nazis rarely hesitated to create a bureaucracy (or a paper trail)—and yet scholars couldn’t see it. Our systems are designed to make waste invisible, at least for those of us who produce most of it.
It wasn’t just recycling but also plastic that emerged from war. The difficulties of rubber extraction and a worldwide ivory shortage led to the 1907 invention of Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, a process Jeffrey L. Meikle traces in American Plastic: A Cultural History. Bakelite could be molded and machined and proved more versatile than labor-intensive rubber or ivory, once the preferred material for European makers of boxes, buttons, combs, and piano keys. The decimation of African and Indian elephant herds thanks to European hunters also spurred the invention of celluloid, another hard, durable substance that originated in nature (its inventor combined nitrocellulose with the sap of the laurel tree), only to be replaced by heat- and water-resistant Bakelite. It was Europe’s colonial quest for raw materials, its booming consumer markets, and then the chemical and war-making industries that created and popularized plastic. The U.S. military, eager to conserve precious rubber, contributed to plastic’s spread in World War II by using it in fuses, parachutes, airplanes, antenna housing, bazooka barrels, helmet liners, and combs distributed to service members as part of a hygiene kit.
